In Landscape with Human Figure, his fourth and most compelling collection of poetry, Rafael Campo confirms his status as one of America’s most important poets. Like his predecessor William Carlos Williams, who was also a physician, Campo plumbs the depths of our capacity for empathy. Campo writes stunning, candid poems from outside the academy, poems that arise with equal beauty from a bleak Boston tenement or a moonlit Spanish plaza, poems that remain unafraid to explore and to celebrate his identity as a doctor and Cuban American gay man. Yet no matter what their unexpected and inspired sources, Campo’s poems insistently remind us of the necessity of poetry itself in our increasingly fractured society; his writing brings us together-just as did the incantations of humankind’s earliest healers-into the warm circle of community and connectedness. In this heart-wrenching, haunting, and ultimately humane work, Rafael Campo has painted as if in blood and breath a gorgeously complex world, in which every one of us can be found.
Editorial Reviews
Review
“While the settings in this collection vary widely — a blacked-out Cuba; a bridge in Florence; a Fayetteville back road — it was the moments in which Campo focuses on the human figures populating these landscapes that resonated the most with me. . . . Moments like these, in which Campo captures some of the nuances of healing, are woven throughout the collection, and remind us that sometimes creating emotional distance — even in writing poetry — is the only way to steel against pain.”–Ricardo Hernandez “Los Angeles Review of Books”
“
Landscape with Human Figure bespeaks compassion, dedication, and the sort of intellectual curiosity you’d expect from an M.D. with a creative writing degree.”–Eric McHenry “New York Times Book Review”
“[A] pleasant and accessible fourth collection of poetry . . . . [T]he gentle, regular rhythms of [Campo’s] poems give them a sense of quiet control. . . . Contemplative, hopeful, and heartfelt. . . .”–Chelsey Johnson “Out”
“[A] powerful collection. . . .”–Gregg Shapiro “Windy City Times”
“[A]mbitious, elegant poems. . . . [I]n
Landscape with Human Figure, Campo’s clear gaze, generous heart and great skill combine to create a resonant and often romantic collection of poems, one that locates and celebrates all our shared ‘outsider’ hearts.”–Kevin Riordan “Philadelphia Gay News”
“Campo confirms his celebrated ability to move from formal verses to far-reaching reflections on alienation and the manifestation of internal energies on external surfaces. With emotion and a technical prowess surgical in its delicacy, the book exposes our raw selves and our travels between beauty and terror.”–Rachel DeWoskin “Boston Magazine”
“Campo is too modest to portray himself as hero, but we sense the heroic in him . . . . [P]art of Campo’s courage is his willingness to confront his own dark fears . . . . Dr. Rafael Campo is inevitably a poet of heartbreak; yet he remains a poet of accompanying hope.”
–Sydney Lea “Hudson Review”
“Rafael Campo blends several selves into his persona as a poet–Cuban-American, openly gay man, physician, AIDS healer, teacher. Each facet of his life is brilliantly yet formally depicted in his fourth collection, Landscape with Human Figure . . . . Each rereading will yield new wisdom, heart, and insight–great poems, really, reveal their truths with inspired reluctance. Campo is among his generation’s best poets . . . .”–Richard Labonte “Front Page”
“Landscape with Human Figure is a striking achievement. I am moved, as his readers are sure to be, by Campo’s wisdom, maturity, depth, heart, and range of experience.”–Grace Schulman
From the Back Cover
“Rafael Campo is an accomplished formalist. I hugely enjoy watching him skitter from sestina to pantoum, sonnet to rhymed couplets, to say nothing of his own nonce forms devised as the situation suggests.”–Maxine Kumin
About the Author
Rafael Campo teaches and practices general internal medicine at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. He is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship and a Pushcart Prize. His debut collection of poetry, The Other Man Was Me, won the 1993 National Poetry Series award. His second collection, What the Body Told, won a Lambda Literary Award; his third, Diva, was a finalist in 2000 for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Paterson Poetry Prize (both titles also available from Duke University Press). His work has been published in DoubleTake, the Los Angeles Times, The Nation,The New Republic,The New York Times Magazine, Out, The Progressive, Salon, Slate, and The Washington Post Book World. He is also the author of a collection of essays now available in paperback under the title The Desire to Heal. He lives in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts.
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